Austria to withdraw from UN migration treaty

11:11
01 November 2018
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Austria will not sign a United Nations agreement on migration, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said on Wednesday, arguing that the pact could not adequately regulate migration and failed to adequately distinguish between legal and illegal migration, DW reported.

The decision by the country's right-wing government follows in the footsteps of the United States and Hungary, whose populist leaders have backed out of the agreement known as the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration.

"We have decided that we will not join the pact," Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz told Austrian public broadcaster ÖRF. Kurz, head of the conservative People's Party (ÖVP), currently governs in coalition with the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ). The coalition has taken a hard-line approach to immigration.

Austria will not send an envoy to the pact's signing in December in Morocco, Austrian media reported.

"We will, therefore, abstain in the vote at the UN General Assembly in the year 2019," Kurz added.

"Migration is not and should not become a human right," Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache from the far-right FPÖ said, reported Austrian newspaper Der Standard. Later, Strache said, "We decide who comes into Austria and no one else."